


What is a Targian Warg and Why Does it Need to be Strangled? - An Etymological Approach

by Fireswan



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: Crack Treated Seriously, Gen, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-07
Updated: 2017-12-07
Packaged: 2019-02-11 21:39:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12944493
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fireswan/pseuds/Fireswan
Summary: While a regrettable lack of detail prevents confident proclamation on the nature of Tarsian wargs and those who strangle them, one can be confident that the wargs are in possession of the nature, if not the form, of the vicious wolves of Old Earth and that the warg-stranglers of Tarsius are straightforward in their work.





	What is a Targian Warg and Why Does it Need to be Strangled? - An Etymological Approach

**Author's Note:**

> A question on "why 'Targian warg-strangler' feels like a ubiquitous phrase that ought to be used throughout sci-fi" pushed me into a black hole of (fascinating) language history and led me to entertain myself by writing an pseudo-essay. I was unable to actually answer the question, but I did develop a picture of the phrase.

VILA: Tarrant has about as much subtlety as a Tarsian Warg-strangler.  
Traitor (series 4, episode 3)

 

A look at ancient Earth literature turns up the word ‘warg’ used to describe creatures such as Fenrir and Grendel’s mother. Most modern descriptions fall into the werewolf/dire wolf/hellhound variety and seem to point back to the grandfather of fantasy literature, JRR Tolkien. In his books the warg are a race of intelligent, demonic wolves which were servants of Sauron during the 3rd age. Tolkien was a lifelong student of ancient Norse and Germanic languages and frequently chose his names out of that vast knowledge base. It appears his warg were named from Old Norse/Old High German words meaning both “wolf” and “strangler, choker.” The Norse root vargr was a common synonym for wolf; the Old English root wearg was used for an outlaw or hunted criminal. 

In Germanic law one finds wearg as a punishment (a concept which goes further back to Hittite law). “He shall be warg”[1][2] appears to be a kind of sentence for crimes that are unredeemable - indeed there are variants of warg used to imply moral or physical corruption or disease. Cast out from community, the outlaw is doomed to wander and can be killed without fear. The ancient method for execution of outlaws was hanging, a punishment that is simply a variation on strangulation. In Old English, Old Saxon, and Old Norse, the gallows is known as the ‘warg-tree’. [3] When taken together, it is a punishment that effectively pronounces the person a werewolf: he may look like a man but he’s dangerous like a wolf and deserves execution. He is a “man of strangulation,” that is, a strangler who deserves to be strangled.

Tarsius itself is only mentioned once, in the episode Traitor, as one of the planets subjugated by the Federation using the Pacification Programme. There are no details give but the Blakes 7 wiki notes that Luba, Porphry Major, and Helotrix, all in Sector 4, were taken at the same time and speculates that Tarsius may have been located there as well. [4]

Based on these pieces of information, a picture begins to develop: a class of hunter, assassin, or thrill-seeker who tracks down a vicious beast and murders it barehanded. Not the type of job that requires a delicate finesse! While a regrettable lack of detail prevents confident proclamation on the nature of Tarsian wargs and those who strangle them, one can be confident that the wargs are in possession of the nature, if not the form, of the vicious wolves of Old Earth and that the warg-stranglers of Tarsius are straightforward in their work.

 

[1] or in the Anglo-Norman he shall “be held to be a wolf and … be proclaimed 'wolf’s-head'”  
[2] Mary R. Gerstein, 'Germanic Warg: The Outlaw as Werwolf’, in G.J. Larson (ed.), Myth in Indo-European Antiquity, p. 132.  
[3] http://www.primitivism.com/hellhounds.htm  
[4] http://blakes7.wikia.com/wiki/Tarsius


End file.
